Shadow of the Warmaster

7

The interface to the Dark Sister was a small luxury apartment with spy links all over the ship; sound only, a visilink was too easy to trace. Parnalee sat in a fur-lined easy chair, his feet up, a bubble glass with fine brandy in it held in the hand he wasn’t using to manipulate the sensor pad. He listened to the sounds on the Bridge, switching from one conversation to another as he grew bored with them.

ELMAS OFKA (Nerves thrumming in her voice):

We should have heard by now. You-Yabass with the fur-you know about these things. Find out what’s happening.

PELS (His voice dropping to its lowest notes, a rumble in his throat, a warning that he was losing hold on his temper’s tail):

Look, Hanifa, Quale says we should be polite, but get off my back, will you? I’m just tickling the Brain till Adelaar gets here; she’s the one who knows it.

(A grating grunt as he cleared his throat, the noise overriding Elmas Ofka’s attempt to speak. When he spoke again, it was with the icy formality of an irritated technician.)

If I did anything so precipitate as try to initiate a general search without being sure I could isolate the activity from the mainBrain below, I would most certainly be warning the Grand Sech that things were happening up here and I would likely would lose control of the shipBrain; in this delicate interval since Adelaar released control of the tap and before she gets here, I will do nothing so stupid.

ELMAS OFKA: Quale Yabass, you know the trans-tubes, take us where the squads are, if they need reinforcing…

QUALE: As soon as Adelaar’s in.

(A pause; Parnalee imagined him checking his thumbchron.)

Only a few minutes more, five at most. Whatever’s happening won’t change that much in five minutes.

ELMAS OFKA (An angry hiss, like a spitting kitten. Sound of footsteps as she prowled about the Bridge.

Parnalee laughed aloud and stroked his hand across the Dark Sister’s metal skin, content for the moment to hear the Empress bested like that, having to spend her impatience in the movements of her body. He played with the pad and brought in another conversation.)

A HORDAR (probably one of Jamber Fausse’s men, Parnalee didn’t know their names and didn’t care to know.):

Look at her, man, I wouldna wanna put my butt in reach of those claws.

SECOND HORDAR: Hunh.

FIRST HORDAR: Wonder how K’mik’s doing. Part of his squad’s a Sea Farm isya, wouldna trust them bitches far as I could throw one.

SECOND HORDAR: Oh, I dunno. She’s one.

(Parnalee pictured him making an obscene gesture toward Elmas Ofka, but he didn’t delude himself that was actually happening: these mamaboys had a ridiculous respect for the whipmistress.)

FIRST HORDAR: Don’t hardly seem so; she don’t act so snotty as others I could name.

SECOND HORDAR: Tried to grope that little Cinnal, eh?

FIRST HORDAR: Got nothing to do with it. They just snotty, that’s all.

Aslan sat at an abandoned station, one foot tucked under her. She scribbled on a battered pad with most of its leaves torn off, looking around at intervals to see if anything interesting was happening. The Ridaar was propped inconspicuously beside a screen, flaking the events of the Bridge, but in situations when more than an unadorned report was required, when her emotions and sensory reactions, her intuitions and expectations were part of the story, it was her habit to write down whatever came into her mind, disjointed words, phrases, the only requirement a precise identification of time and place.

The Rau was picking delicately at a sensorboard, calling up items and lists, absorbing what was there, his relatively immobile face unreadable. Elmas Ofka was still pacing, throwing angry looks at Pels and at the door. Quale sat at another station, looking sleepy and disengaged. Karrel Goza and Lirrit Ofka were standing apart from the other Hordar, not touching but intensely aware of each other, their conversation single words or phrases interrupted by long periods of silence. Jamber Fausse joined his band; they were gathered by the prisoners, talking in low mutters and looking suspiciously at the others on the Bridge. This clutch of mismates, she thought, they looked like a separating sauce; somebody’s going to have to give them a few brisk stirs to save the mix.

Adelaar came striding in, crossed to Quale. “Still mopping up?”

“So it seems; we haven’t heard anything from the other squads.” He gave the Hanifa a lazy grin as she joined them. “You think you could run a scan on the ship without triggering wrong ideas in downside techs?”

“Give me a minute.” She swung round and loped over to Pels; they consulted in polysyllabic mutters for several minutes, then he jumped down, let her have the command station, moved to the nearest aux com station and brought it online.

Aslan moved closer, her eyes shifting from Adelaar’s busy hands to the small screen at the station; it was the first time since she was a small child that she’d seen her mother doing real work. Never when she was home for a visit and not back at Base. She wasn’t welcome at the Listening Station; Adelaar did very little while she was there, either turning over her work to Parnalee or Kumari and walking outside with her, or chasing her with impatient cutting words which came so close to quarreling that she left rather than provoke her mother further. Her mother’s facility reminded her rather oddly of Xalloor’s dancing; she watched Adelaar and remembered Unntoualar females weaving, Vandavremmi stormdancers weaving bubble sculptures fifty kilometers across. Even Sarmaylen walking round and round a rock, reading images into it. Enigmatic, fascinating, rather demonic. A capacity for unraveling secrets and extending control over other people far beyond what she herself considered acceptable.

Images on the small screen, pale green lines, a race through successive cross sections, a jolting stop and the great mainscreen flared into activity. A huge cavernous space about massive shipdrives, control stations dark and dusty except for the central area. A complex mix of sounds, the explosions of the pellet guns, the ping-whine of ricochets, shouts, groans, clatter of feet on catwalks, unidentifiable knocks, cracks, thuds. Four bodies motionless on the catwalks, some distance apart, no two on the same level. A fighter lay bleeding slowly from one arm, the other three were low-level techs in the Drive Gang. A small dark form darted out of shadow, shot at something, threw himself into a twisting roll that took him back into shadow. Adelaar’s shoulders twitched. “Quale.”

“Right. Hailer, hmm?”

“Ready. You talk, they’ll hear.”

“Right.” He set a hand on the back of her chair. “The Bridge is taken,” he said. “If you surrender, you’ll be set down on Tassalga alive and in good shape. If you continue your resistance, you’ll be dead. Keeping on is futile. In a few days we will be sending this Warship into the sun. Kanlan Gercik, collect your squad, get them out of there. We can seal any holdouts in the Drive Sector and let them fry.” His voice was weary, uninterested in what the holdouts decided, a lazy baritone smooth as cream and far more convincing than a raucous scream. Aslan scribbled rapidly, scatter-shot words that said, in effect, I-don’t-care-what-you-do can be more terrifying than hate and rage.

The image went silent, still.

A moment later Kanlan Gercik’s voice sounded from somewhere near the control bank. “Zhurev, Meskel Suffor, Harli Tanggаr, move your units toward the entrance. Meskel, can you get to your wounded friend?”

In his soft slurring west coast accent, Meskel Suffor answered, “If the others give me cover; better so, if the Gang shows a touch of smarts and surrenders.”

“Start moving. Quale Yabass, is there any way of getting the name of the Engineer?”

Quale shifted his gaze to Adelaar, raised his brows.

Adelaar nodded, worked her pads and pulled up three names on the small screen. “They’re all Huvveds. Erek Afa Kaffadar, Boksor Tra Shiffre, Marak Sha Yarmid.”

“Any idea which?”

“No indication.”

“Kanlan Gercik, did you hear that?”

“If you could repeat them?” After Quale finished the list, Kanlan called out, “Erek, Bokso, Marak, whichever you are. Talk to me.”

More silence, broken mainly by scuffs and some tings where something metallic touched a rail or a piece of equipment, the members of the squad edging toward the entrance.

“What guarantee do we have?” The voice was gruff, impatient, with the arrogant edge of a top-rank Huvved.

“The guarantee you’ll fry.”

“We have the drives.”

“So you can sit and watch them hum as you head for the sun.” A snort. “You got some kind of idea you can run them without the shipBrain?”

Silence.

Muttering.

A scuffle.

Then a different voice. “Hang on a minute.” More muttering.

A dull thump (pellet gun tossed onto the rubbery floor covering), more thumps, more guns.

“That’s it. Hold everything. We’re coming out. We got to carry Tra Shiffre.”

“I hear. Quale Yabass?”

“You can start forward with them, but don’t hurry, we’ve got to see what’s happening with the other squads. Anything comes up; give us a yell, Adelaar will keep an ear tuned to you. Questions?”

“That seems to do it.”

“Hanifa,” Quale looked down at the Diver. “Anything you want to say?”

Her eyes were fixed on the screen. She was frowning; when he spoke, she shook her head impatiently. “Get on with it.”

“Gotcha. Adelaar, Play Sector next, then the Sleep Sector.”

The green lines of the schematic flashed again onto the main screen and flickered through cross sections as before. Then the lines were gone and a Pleasure Field filled the screen, roughly oval and somewhat larger than the chamber outside the Bridge door, a cheerful, bright-colored space broken into smaller and larger areas, irregular shapes partly open to the main arena, a combination of bistro, gymnasium, orgy-drum, sensorama, and less-dedicated spaces that catered to assorted individual quirks and kinks.

The mat in the gymspace was littered with flaccid dreaming bodies and the two squads assigned to that area were busily trotting in and out of the Pleasure Field carting in more of them, men and women, crew and support, some naked, some dressed in fantastic costume, some in uniform, some in grubby overalls. The men and women doing the carting looked sweaty, but exuberantly carefree; the grimness she’d marked in them when they marched on board the tug was still there, but only as a ghostly background to the present pleasure. Despite their visible weariness, they were shouting ribald jokes at each other, trading insults and speculations about the activities of the bodies they carried. As far as Aslan could tell, no one had been killed, no one injured badly enough for the wound to show. No bandages, no bruise, no scrapes.

Quale turned to Adelaar. “Sound?”

“Ready.”

“Tazmin Duvvar. You round somewhere? Akkin Siddaki?”

Laughter, whoops, hill-and-grass raiderband salutes to Elmas Ofka that quickly degenerated into obscurely idiomatic barbs aimed at Quale and the Bridge party, (Aslan scribbled rapidly, getting the essence of the more interesting insults, the hill-and-grassers were famous for the inventiveness of their invective), two of Elmas Ofka’s isyas shouted more intimate greetings, drunk on victory as much as wine; ordinary proprieties stripped away, they floated on a cloud of euphoria.

One of the older raiders moved apart from the rest, set his hands on his hips and roared the others to silence. “Varak, go get Tazmin. What you want, Quale Yabass?”

“We were getting bored sitting around up here, started wondering what was happening in the other sectors. Looks like you’ve pretty well cleaned up your area. Any problems?”

Akkin Siddaki waited until Tazmin Duvvar pushed through the gathering Hordar and reached his side. “Quale,” he said. “Wants to know if we’ve got problems.”

“Cartage mainly,” Tazmin said, “these kokotils were drunk, drugged, or screwing their brains if any out; it was like shooting fish in a barrel. If you could dig up some transport for us, it’d save a lot of sweat.”

Akkin nodded. “We’ve got most of the ship people transferred here, there’s some whores and some of the kitchen crew still laying where they fell, maybe a dozen, not much more than that. Like you see, there’s quite a pile of them. There’s a transtube outlet just off this chamber. We could stuff them in that if you’ll have the yabass Adelaar program the tube and arrange a welcoming party; you’ve got the holding space ready yet?”

“It should be by the time you’re finished. Adelaar just got here, she’ll take care of that once we finish this survey. Pels, see what you can find for transport.”

“Right. Soon as I can get access. Adelaar?”

“When we finish this, I’ll free some lines for you.”

“Quale Yabass?” Akkin Siddaki leaned forward, his dark face intent.

“About ten minutes, if I had to make a guess.”

“That’s not it. I’ve got a brother in the Sleeper squad, how’s he doing?”

“We haven’t checked that one yet, it’s next on our list. There was some trouble in the Drive area, one wounded, a raider from the west coast, I think. I don’t know how serious. Want me to get the name?”

“When you get a minute.”

“Right. If anything comes up, give a yell. Adelaar, Sleepers.”

A few minutes later a short stretch of dimly lit corridor took up most of the screen. Empty. Silent. A short distance from the eyepoint a small oval crystal touched with honey-amber the lifeless neuter colors of the walls and floor. The doorway below the crystal gaped open. The light inside the room was a ghostly grayish yellow that merged seamlessly with the light in the corridor.

The eyepoint moved, dipped into the sleeping cell. Four bodies on the floor.

The eyepoint dropped to hover over the nearest. It swept from head to toe, raced back to the nape of the Hordar’s neck and focused on a hexagonal black spot half-obscured by a strand of hair.

Elmas Ofka bit a cry in half. After a minute she said, “Dart.” Her hands closed over the back of Pel’s chair, tightening until it creaked under the pressure of her fingers. “All of them?”

The eyepoint continued to move. It searched the other three, centimeter by centimeter. It found more darts. It swept out, sped to the next occupied cell and dived inside.

Elmas Ofka saw Jirsy’s startled, frozen face and stopped breathing for a long frozen moment. Then she shrieked with rage and grief, grabbed at her hair, tore loose hanks of it; Lirrit Ofka screamed, clawed at her face, her nails scoring bloody lines in her flesh. Then Karrel Goza and Jamber Fausse were there, holding them, confining their struggles, muffling their cries, letting them bite and kick and scratch, accepting the pain as part of sharing the grief, a grief that grew more bitter as the eyepoint moved on and they saw the other dead, as Karrel Goza saw his cousin Geres sprawled in the Y-branch.

Aslan watched and automatically noted her impressions on the pad; she felt uncomfortable about writing while this was happening, she’d known little Jirsy Indiz and liked her; nonetheless, she wrote. The isya phenomenon was endlessly interesting. She hadn’t understood before this how powerfully those bonds operated once the isya was formed; the strength of it was suddenly made visible for her; the pain of the severance was apparent in the violence of the women’s reactions. Her stylus flew across the battered page. More than kin, she wrote, closer than lovers. Karrel Goza seeing his cousin’s body, wept, face red, anger and grief. None of this self-mutilation, this loss of control. The difference explainable by isya bonding? Or by culturally determined sex role differentiation? Sex roles complex here. Women powerful/powerless. Huvved/Hordar very different, their ideas about women. Suggest someone come, study isya phenom. Trakkar je Neves? Her subject, yes. Contact, see if interest. Outsiders reaction isya hysteria revealing. Consider. History of? Personality differential? Profession, its effect on…

Quale leaned against the console, his face shuttered. He was looking away from the women, shut off from them by something in his past or in his character that washed out the flashes of strength he could show and left him looking oddly empty, as if he were so tired of living that he’d lost the ability to feel either joy or pain.

Adelaar looked over her shoulder, distaste her most visible reaction. She went back to what she was doing. Jaunniko called you one icy femme, Mama, maybe he was right. No, that’s wrong. We’ve clawed at each other often enough; I can’t accuse you of lacking passion, Mama. You’re just not interested in other people’s passion.

The Rau’s ears twitched, closed in on themselves like fingers making a fist. He kept working.

Elmas Ofka went suddenly quiet. She sucked in a breath, in and in and in, the soft sound seemed to last forever, to mute the other sounds on the Bridge, then she let the breath out. Again out and out, a long rasping sigh. She pushed against Jamber Fausse’s arms. He dropped them and stepped back. “Lirrit!” Her voice was sharp, demanding.

Lirrit broke a sob in half, stood in shuddering silence for another few breaths, then she pushed at Karrel Goza’s chest and turned in a grim, controlled silence to watch what was happening on the screen.

“Who?” Elmas Ofka said, her voice soft as thistledown and cold.

Quale straightened, seemed to shake himself, sloughing the detachment that had grayed him down. “Parnalee,” he said.

She swung around, her temper flaring, but before she could say anything, Churri spoke. “Parnalee,” he said. “He played you like a gamefish, Hanifa. That’s his business. He’s good at it.”

“I don’t understand.”

Churri shrugged. “Who does. Crazy is crazy.”

Elmas Ofka closed her eyes, brushed a hand across her face. “I see. Find him. Now.”

Quale raised a brow. “Why bother? Leave him in his hole and let him fry.”

Elmas Ofka trembled, controlled herself immediately. “Find him,” she said. “We can argue what happens afterward.”

Adelaar didn’t wait to be asked; she huddled over her sensor pads, called up strings of words and numbers, scanned them, repeated the process several times, selected some, re-entered them. Aslan watched the image flow, expand, contract, change in little and in toto, the glyphs and figures like minute green demons dancing to the beat of her mother’s fingertips. The schematic filled the screen again, centered on the Bridge, the Navel. It flashed away in pie-slice wedges, a game of jackstraws with Mama’s fingers picking surely through them. Shivering among the green lines were fuzzy red lights and several pale ambers, arranged in clusters. Each time a light appeared, she exploded a small white dot in the center of it and went on without further reaction. One by one she swept through the wedges until she’d done them all; Aslan frowned, there seemed to be more wedges than the geometry of the ship allowed for. Mama’s magic, play the numbers, ah! she bit back a giggle and scribbled on her pad.

Adelaar swung around. “I’ve located all lifesources that the ship can detect. That means exactly what it says. There may be dead areas, this is an antique and badly maintained, and there are places in her deliberately kept off the record; if he knows about those places, well, he knows a lot too much. You’re wrong, Quale. We don’t dare let him wait us out.”

Leaving them to chew that over, she kicked around, touched a sensor and leaned back to watch the screen as the Brain flipped from spot to spot, froze momentarily on a scene, long enough to take in the details, then moved on to the next. Akkin Siddaki and Tazmin Duvvar supervising the tag end of the body-gathering. Flip-flip, body squads walking tiredly to the last few bodies, a whore here, a scutsweep there.

After a short stretch of looking on while the Brain flashed through scenes that she’d seen before, Adelaar moved restlessly, then pushed her chair around and leaned toward Pels; for several minutes she talked in an undertone to him. The Rau listened, nodded, then got busy on the sensor pads at his substation, his eyes fixed on the notation screen. Over their heads the images flickered from the stunned shipfolk in the sleeping cells to the scattered bodies of the dead. Adelaar sat back, satisfied.

The eyepoint jumped to the Hordar and their prisoners marching up from the Drive Sector. Kanlan Gercik and his cousin Zhurev Iavru were the first to appear, scouting ahead for ambushes. The wounded west-coaster came next; he was stretched on an improvised litter being carried by Meskel Suffor and another west-coaster. Then three Hordar from Gercik’s Raiders. Then the captive Drive Gang with more litters, two wounded, one dead. One stunned and heavily unconscious Huvved. Harli Tanggаr had her sister isya Melly Birah with her and two women from another isya on the far side of the captives, all of them keeping a fierce eye on their prisoners. Behind them came the rest of the squad, the rearguard.

The eyepoint left them, whipped to the drive room, hovered momentarily over the cooling corpses, leaped again and focused on an ancient eremite living in a rat’s nest of scraps and paper and scavenged bits of equipment, filthy white hair knotted on top his head, a few threads of beard, vermin crawling in and out of his hair, in and out of his layered filthy clothing.

Quale rubbed his hand along his jaw. “Makes you itch,” he said.

“What?” Elmas Ofka came quietly to stand beside him. She stared up at the image. “What are we looking at?”

Another shift. Another mouse in the walls, this one painfully neat and weirder than the rat, he was walking through elaborate square corners, running a folded whiter-than-white cloth over every surface in his sparsely furnished lair, an irregular space created by the intersection of stressbeams and baffles, choosing the areas he dealt with according to a pattern in his miswired head.

“Discard,” Quale said. “Took the measure of life up here and took himself out of it.”

“Why are we looking at this?”

Lirrit Ofka came over, leaned against Elmas Ofka, arm curled loosely about her waist. “Yuk.”

The eyepoint was hovering over a nest of scavenger moles big as hunting cats, the young nosing blindly at the side of one while another heavily gravid female was regurgitating scraps of anonymous meat for half a dozen yearlings.

“Why are we looking at these things?”

Adelaar turned her head. “The Brain searched out lifeforms, Hanifa. We have to see them all before we know if one could be Parnalee.”

The eyepoint continued to jump. More moles, bats, mobile fungi, other, less-identifiable life forms, things mutated into half-glimpsed horrors.

“This is wasting time.”

“No,” Adelaar said, “we’re finding out where not to look for him.”

The large screen went blank, flipped back to the schematic of the Bridge.

“I was afraid of that, he’s in a blind spot somewhere.” She kicked the chair around, taped nervously at the arm. “Probably listening to us.”

“Listening?”

“Were it me in his place, I would be. At the least, listening.”

“So where is he?”

“I told you. A blind spot.”

“Get the others up here. We’ll do it our way, gridsearch this thing till we find him.”

“Fine. If you’ve got a year or two.”

“What?”

“How long would it take to search gul Inci room by room?”

Elmas Ofka frowned at the screen, one arm folded across her breasts, her fingers moving slowly up and down the biceps of her other arm. “Then how…?”

“Let me think about that awhile. And see if I can do something about snoops.”

“Ah.”

Adelaar crossed her legs, tapped her fingers on the arms of her chair. “The holding area for the prisoners is ready and Pels has set the tube to it. It’s near one of the lifepod banks so your people won’t have far to move them once you’re ready to pop the pods.”